The present invention relates to a bill receiving and dispensing machine having a bill feeding-out means for feeding out in order the lowermost of accumulated bills by a bill feeding-out roller contacted with the lowermost bill, and more particularly to a bill pressing-down apparatus used for the bill receiving and dispensing machine for pressing down the accumulated bills from the top thereof to provide the bill feeding-out roller with sufficient frictional force required for smoothly feeding out the bills.
A bill receiving and dispensing machine has been known as a machine for reusing receiving bills for dispensation bills. Heretofore, there have been developed several types of bill receiving and dispensing machine in which a frictional type bill feeding-out mechanism having a roller is arranged at accumulated bill supporting areas of the machine (for example, at a bill receiving and dispensing mouth for delivering bills to the user and at a circulating-bill pooling section for pooling received bills to be reused for dispensation) so as to feed out the lowermost of the accumulated bills to a predetermined bill transferring route by the friction roller.
Such a bill feeding-out mechanism is so constructed that the roller is contacted with the lowermost bill of the accumulated bills to feed out in order the bills by friction acting between the roller and the lowermost bill and is usually required to have a bill pressing-down apparatus which presses the accumulated bills from the top thereof to provide the roller with sufficient frictional force required to feed out the bills. For example, Japanese laid-open patent publication No. 067334/1985 discloses a bill pressing-down apparatus of this type in which a bill pressing-down plate is constantly linearly urged by an appropriate urging means toward the roller along a guide rod vertically arranged in the direction of bill accumulation regardless of the amount of the accumulated bills.
However, in order to surely actuate the bill pressing-down plate regardless of the amount of the accumulated bills, a sufficiently long guide rod must be provided so as to smoothly move the pressing-down plate from a maximum height of the accumulated bills to below the minimum height of the accumulated bills (i.e. to the level of the bill accumulating plate). This makes the driving mechanism and the guide rod of the bill pressing-down plate long in the vertical direction and thus it becomes difficult to reduce the size of the bill pressing-down apparatus itself as well as an overall size of the bill receiving and dispensing machine.
In addition, it has been a recent tendency in the bill receiving and dispensing machines to arrange the bill accumulating plate in inclined condition so as to flush the edges of the bills and to stabilize the feeding-out operation. In such a case, the bill pressing-down plate must be so constructed that it always follows the inclined upper surface of the accumulated bills so as to uniformly distribute the pressing-down force over the top entire surface of the accumulated bills to smoothly and stabilizingly feed out the accumulated bills.